Sunday, February 16, 2014

Our trip to Peru
had many highlights. Of course the reason we went was to fulfill one of my
wife’s lifelong ambitions, to see the ancient site at Machu Picchu. She was born and raised in India and we had visited
the Taj Mahal together in 1985. One can read about Shah Jahan’s shrine to his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal and look at many pictures, but actually being
there takes the experience to a new level. The pictures simply do not do its
ethereal beauty any kind of justice.

I had of course heard of Machu Picchu and knew that it had
been built by the Incas and not
discovered and destroyed by the Spaniards. I had also seen pictures of the
site, mainly the famous one shown on tourist material that gives a view from a
high point, with a sharply peaked mountain in the background.

It was time to do some reading and as usual before a big
trip we took out a Lonely Planet book from
our local Saskatoon Public Library. Their
picture shows how complex and amazing the site really is.

Before we headed to what is probably Peru’s most famous spot
we had the good fortune to spend a few days in the city of Cuzco. The main
reason I had been pleased that our itinerary with the excellent Intrepid Companymade this stop was the matter of altitude. The elevation at Machu Picchu’s
high point is 2430 m (almost 8,000ft). That was going to be hard enough for
prairie dwellers. For the last five years of our Kenya days we had lived in a
small cottage on the weirdly named Lunatic
Lane in Nanyuki at 1905m (6250 ft.).
While there my doctor wife had seen a number of cases of altitude sickness
some of them fatal, mainly in young, very fit military men who had ascended Mt. Kenya all too quickly and been
overcome. I had seen a couple of cases of the same thing in cattle living
around the 2500m mark. Cuzco is quite a bit higher at 3400m (11,200ft). If we
could acclimatize to that, even a little bit, then Jo’s main goal should /
would be no problem.

We were in for a surprise. Our guidebook mentioned that Cuzco is the ancient
capital of the Inca kingdom and indeed we saw many fascinating things, both in and
around the city. What struck me, more than anything else, was the stonework. It
was explained to us by our charming and excellent guide Patricia who took five years of university to become a registered
guide.

Detail of stone joints

Sacsaywaman, aka "SexyWoman"

While the huge rocks at sites likeSacsaywaman
are amazing both for their sheer size and the fact that they must have been
fitted after months or maybe years of shaping (you could not hope to slide a
credit card between them, and there is no mortar), it was the intricate
moulding and shaping in the Qorikancha church, which lies in the city centre,
that really caught my eye. Maybe that is because I am a sometime woodworker and have some idea of the challenges, say in making a chess table. I have lots of fancy tools to make things fit. Seven hundred years ago the
artisans who built these things did not have quite as much :)

Qorikancha has several types of stone lock

One type of lock

As you can see from the photos they used several different patterns to make the
stones both fit and lock. Again no mortar. If the archaeologists and historians
are correct, the stonemasons used hematite
to grind the granite-like rocks. Wow! Is probably the least one can say.

A partly opened wall showing diffefrent locked stones

Of
course the church is sadly more famous for what is missing than for what
remains. The Spaniards removed many tonnes of solid gold sheets and sculptures,
melted them down and shipped them back across the Atlantic via what is today
Panama.

Patricia explained the likely reason for this intricate
work. It was to earthquake-proof the buildings. There have been many (at least
40) such seismic events
since the first recorded one in 1586. Patricia mentioned the 7.0 Richter scale
one in 1950 that occurred right in the Cuzco region.

Long before that the Inca builders had worked out that the
interlocking stones and trapezoid doors and windows protected their buildings
against the hearth’s shakings. Indeed, where the conquering Spanish had
destroyed all but the bases of the old temples their newly built churches
sometimes collapsed, leaving the older walls intact.

So, with excitement and anticipation we headed off by bus and
train to Jo’s dream site. There we saw more amazing stonework.

Temple of the sun – east and south-facing windows

The detail at
the most important religious spot, the temple of the sun, is just as intricate
at that at Qorikancha, as is the work at the House of the High Priest. At most
other spots it is less crafted but just as robust.

The terraces for agriculture and their retaining walls all lie
facing towards the rising sun. All those workers, for all those years, needed
food. A real example of home-grown! Patricia told us that recent work has shown
that most of the structure, some 60%, lies underground in the foundations.

Descending tanks, all feedng one another

Intihuatana - see the hitch at right

An important part of the structures is the Hitching Post of the Sun (Intihuatana) which was used by astronomers to
predict solstices. Water too was a vital part of the complex - the tanks at right all feed one another.

Anno domini, dodgy knees and rain-soaked stones forced us to
adopt the discretion is the better part
of valour approach to the last steep climb up to the hut of the caretaker of the funerary rock at the
very top of the ancient site where those iconic photos are taken. Luckily group
member Arran Smith, a newly minted
vet (qualified almost 49 years after me!) shared his own pictures. He caught
this one just before the clouds descended and obscured the wonderful view.

Arran’s view - thanks Arran!

Just like the Taj, none of the pictures does any sort of
justice to the experience of being there.

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

My wife Jo and I have just returned from a memorable trip to
Ecuador and Peru.

We organized our trip with the Intrepid company and they looked after us very well. Of course our
main objectives were to visit the Galapagos
Islands and Machu Picchu. They
were indeed stunning, fascinating and thoroughly worthwhile. There was more
that we had not expected.

On an outing near Cuzco, in Peru
our charming and very well informed guide, Patricia,
gave us the option of taking a side-trip to an extraordinary site that dates
back at least 2,000 years. It is called Moray.

Once you leave the excellent tarred road the track to the
site is a bit dodgy, but there were crews working on the mud and potholes with
heavy machinery and we got through.

The extraordoinary 2000 year old site at Moray

There are three amphitheatre-like depressions in the natural
contours of the hills, and each has been developed into what looks, at first
sight, like an enormous set of bleachers. If the archaeologists have it right
they had nothing to do with sport or performance art, but everything to do with
agriculture and ag research.

The best preserved of them, the main one shown to tourists, has
over twenty terraced levels. The most remarkable feature is that the
temperature range between the top and bottom of the structure is 15°C (about 59°F for the
unconverted).

Steps for right and left foot climbers

That is not all. At every level the ancient builders made sure that
workers with bad knees, like me, could get up an down to till the land using
steps set in the walls. They also thought about irrigation.

My arrow shows the top water channel

A line of water
courses, set one above the other, descends throughout the structure. If you
take a close look at this picture on the left you can see a rectangular ruin at the bottom.
This is not an old and mis-shapen tennis court, but the foundation of what was
almost certainly a storage house. Patricia had never had a guest suggest the
tennis idea, but it was fun to see her double take.

Checking me out - but I don't know his name.

As I sat and admired the view this little character, about
the size of a house sparrow or a chickadee, came and sat on the adjacent agave
plant no more than a couple of metres away. I could not resist! I have scanned
through the first ten Google sites
on the query “Birds of Peru”, but
maybe this fellow is simply too “normal” to get mention or take up disc space.
Any expert birders out there?

Our June 2013 Lonely Planets
guidebook has a brief description of the Moray site and tells us that the entry
fee is $10. By February it had risen to $15. Still a bargain at the price.

Saturday, February 8, 2014

Last week I
was in Peru and met an experienced airline steward who has flown with major
airlines for many years into, and more to the point, out of several West
African capitals. We got chatting about the bushmeat situation, something I
have written about in books and on blogs
for several years.

One of Amman's many pictures of the bushmeat trade

Of course
writers with bigger followings, like the remarkable Karl Amman have written and photographed bushmeat and poaching stories to a wide audience.
He also graciously allowed me to use some of his images in my book The Trouble With Lions .

The late
Anna Mertz, who worked as an engineer in West Africa for many years reported on
the horror show of truck loads of dead and badly injured antelopes appearing almost in
food markets in Ghana long before the bushmeat trade issue reached a wider
global audience.

My steward acquaintance
told me that loads of bushmeat continue to come out of Africa bound for the UK
with every flight. It is packed in passenger luggage, and the security officers
who check bags before departure have no interest in, and probably no
jurisdiction over it.They are concerned
with weapons.

The airplane
staff can do little about it either. They do try to curtail the excess baggage
situation, but even that is a hopeless task, as the routine response from
Nigerian passengers is that a white-skinned staff member is picking on a black
person. Inevitably some of the bags leak their contents and many planes end up
with bloodstains and bad smells.

In KenyaAnn Olivecrona told me how she chanced to witness a bushmeat import at
London’s Heathrow airport. As I wrote in 2008:

“in May 2004 she witnessed an
amazing interchange involving bushmeat at London’s Heathrow airport. Her plane
happened to arrive at more or less the same time as a flight from Lagos. During
the time that she watched the procession, customs officials stopped every one
of the Nigerian passengers and asked for the huge suitcases to be opened.
Almost all were packed with smoked bushmeat.”

The bushmeat
trade poses serious risks at both ends.

In Africa it
is leading the rapid depletion of wildlife populations. Many species are
involved. While primates are the most evocative for most people, the most
popular species is the cane rat of the genus Thryonomys, known locally as cutting grass.
They can weigh as much as 10 kg in the wild and in most West Africa countries efforts
have been made to rear them for the meat market.

Here is a picture from the Wiki of one such rat, a male Greater Cane Rat (Thryonomys
swinderianus) in a breeding station in Owendo, Gabon.

Many tribes in the region
have long held certain species taboo. Not any more. Anything goes.One example is the African buffalo, long
deemed off limits to one clan in Ghana. In October 2001 Ghanaian journalist Vivian Baah wrote a series of articles
under the title “Guess What’s Cooking for Dinner?” in the Evening News of Accra. She related how in parts of Ghana:

“among the Ekona clan of the Ashanti's, it
is a taboo to kill the Ekuo (buffalo). But these days, the members of this clan
themselves are the worst offenders. Having turned their backs on the taboo,
they now butcher the Ekuo with cheeky ease.”

Cape buffalo - aka Ekuo in Ghana

Of course
this process will inevitably lead to the law of diminishing returns. Species
will simply disappear or become rare.

In Europe
there are serious disease risks. Much of the continent has an endemic
foot-and-mouth disease status. If the disease gets into UK, for instance, it
will cause billions of dollars worth of economic damage. All it needs is for
some improperly preserved meat to carry the virus to destination. A little bad
luck or carelessness and the explosion would take place. If this seems unlikely
one only has to look at my home province of Saskatchewan, where, in 1952,
illegally imported smoked meat from Poland led to the last outbreak of FMD.

Fruit bats roositng in Uganda

It is not
just livestock diseases. Ebola and the closely related and equally deadly
Marburg virus can infect humans who handle primate and fruit bat carcasses
(fruit bats are a popular bushmeat item).

HIV/Aids came to humans via
chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys. No doubt there are other examples.

In a TTWL chapter
titled Bushmeat and Bureaucrats I
tried to make the point that thousands of words on paper would achieve nothing
much. One example of such verbiage came from the European parliament. A tome
from that body that took four years to reach “Provisional
Edition” status came out in 2004.

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Jerry Haigh

About Me

My career as a wildlife veterinarian and storyteller has taken me to many countries for work on a wide range of species. I enjoy relating stories about the wild animal work, which range from having soldier ants up my shorts and pregnancy checking a lion to giving an enema to a rhino and encounters with a shaman from the Tsaatan reindeer herders in the mountains of Mongolia. I enjoy weaving African and other folktales into accounts of my own experiences with animals.
In Africa I have worked in Kenya, Uganda, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa and Cameroon. In North America I have worked on species as diverse as polar bears, wood bison, seals, wolves, moose and elk. For thirty years I have worked on a wide variety of deer species on four continents.
If you entered this blog directly you might like to take a look at pictures and extracts of my three books "Wrestling With Rhinos", "The Trouble With Lions" and "Of Moose and Men" that you can find on my web site at www.jerryhaigh.com